(Oct. 13) -- Al-Qaida's alleged operatives in the West have usually been fairly marginal characters: bookstore owners in northern England, underemployed youths in dead-end Parisian suburbs, even a former Chicago gang member. But Monday the French authorities formally charged a particle physicist who worked at CERN, home of the world's largest high-velocity particle accelerator, with connections to al-Qaida.
French investigators say Adlène Hicheur, 32, has admitted to being in communication with a known member of al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb, or AQIM. That group has claimed responsibility for numerous attacks and kidnappings in North Africa, including the killings in Mauritania earlier this year of American Christopher Leggett and British citizen Edwen Dyer. AQIM and its predecessor group, the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat, also have a presence in France. Terrorist officials there and in other European countries have expressed concerned about the group's ability to actively recruit among Continental residents of North African origin.
Skip over this content
Jean-Pierre Clatot, AFP / Getty Images
A French-Algerian physicist charged with al-Qaida connections worked at CERN, site of the Large Hadron Collider, pictured, which is the world's premier facility for researching sub-atomic particles.
"It has to give officials pause when a terrorist group is capable, as AQIM could be, of recruiting someone with access to such sensitive areas," says Matthew Levitt, director of the Stein Program on Counterterrorism and Intelligence at the Washington Institute.
The elite group of physicists who collaborate in the experiments at CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) outside Geneva, Switzerland, are puzzled by Hicheur's arrest. "He's a dedicated and serious guy, a hard worker who has done lots of nice analysis," says Steven Blusk, an associate professor at the University of Syracuse, who frequently worked with Hicheur in his capacity as coordinator last year of a CERN working group. "I hope this turns out to be a misunderstanding, a case of him not realizing who he was talking to."
Hicheur, who holds dual French-Algerian citizenship, was detained Oct. 8 in the French city of Vienne along with his younger brother, who was later released. A French anti-terrorism judge placed him under formal investigation on Monday on suspicion of "criminal activities in association with a terrorist enterprise."
French judicial sources have told the French press that American investigators flagged their French colleagues after intercepting e-mails from Hicheur as long as 18 months ago. Those communications, according to the judicial sources, revealed the "wish and intention" to carry out terrorist attacks, but they were of a general nature and had not progressed toward any operation.
Hicheur has a Ph.D. from the University of Savoie in Annecy, France, not far from Geneva. He worked in the summer of 2002 at the Stanford Linear Accelerator in Menlo Park, Calif,, a U.S. Department of Energy facility, and later had a fellowship at the British government's Rutherford Appleton Laboratory. He was employed by the Swiss Federal Polytechnic Institute of Lausanne but worked at CERN.
Hicheur's work centered on analyzing sub-nuclear particles whose existence is revealed by controlled particle collisions at extremely high speeds. "He co-wrote a well-received paper mapping the magnetic fields in a collider," said Sheldon Stone, a physics professor at Syracuse who also worked at CERN. "It's very honorable work, but it's a service job."
In a statement Monday, CERN stressed that it "does not carry out research in the fields of nuclear power or nuclear weaponry" and "does not possess materials that could be used for terrorism."
That doesn't make the arrest any less unsettling. Says Stone: "It's hard for all of us to imagine that a real physicist would be involved with al-Qaida."
